Ellen Burstyn retire? Not any time soon

When she turned 65, Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”) recalls, her mother asked, “Are you going to retire soon?” Her response: “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

Nearly 11 years later, Burstyn is still going strong. She recently filmed two episodes of HBO’s “Big Love,” the series about polygamous marriage, playing the mother of Barbara (Jeanne Tripplehorn). She’s also playing another mother -- Barbara Bush -- in Oliver Stone’s film on President Bush, “W.”

“Working with Oliver Stone is exciting,” she says. “He has a very kind of volatile personality. He hasn’t been exploding all over the place, but you can kind of feel it below the surface that he could explode at any time. But he’s very wildly talented and very creative and charming -- in an odd way. He’s very sweet and has been very nice to me. So I am having a good time.”

Burstyn’s latest film, the Canadian production “The Stone Angel,” opens in theaters Friday. The intimate, character-driven drama is based on Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s novel about a feisty woman named Hagar who is suffering from dementia and struggling against being forced to live in a nursing home. Christine Horne plays the heroine in flashbacks of her younger years.

Before production began, Burstyn visited nursing homes, looked at films and read books on the elderly and dementia. “But I found -- and it’s pretty interesting -- that once you get the basic idea of what’s happening, you can find those places in yourself,” she says. “Everything is in us.”

-- Susan King